My grandparents were born in the 1800’s. My grandfather was in World War I and later worked as an accountant for Domino Sugar Company in New York City. My grandmother was way ahead of her time, working for the Shalimar perfume company…and raising four kids. To this day I can picture him—standing six feet tall, straight back, with a full head of pure white hair, and when I get a whiff of Shalimar, well, my grandmother always comes to mind.
Believe it or not, these things got me thinking about the evolution of marketing (or lack thereof). What’s the structure of today’s marketing plans? Way back when my grandparents were around, marketers simply had to make people “aware” of their new and improved offerings. There wasn’t that much to choose from, so standing out from the crowd was pretty easy. Companies just spent a ton of money on mass media advertising and that was that.
But today the marketplace has evolved. In fact, it’s changed faster than most marketing executives have changed. Today’s marketplace is not only full of hundreds of thousands of products and services, it’s also full of hundreds of places to insert your advertising or marketing campaigns.
The customers are still there, although in much bigger numbers, but they’ve evolved too. Now they’ve learned how to tune out, or otherwise hide from marketers. And yet marketers have not evolved with them. While the marketplace pendulum has swung from a fascination with image and consumption, to a preoccupation with experience and value, marketers continue to focus on awareness, engagement, and other extinct concepts.
Awareness is not the nature of marketing today. Neither is engagement. In layman’s terms, it would be hard to smell the Shalimar today because there are so many other scents surrounding you.
Today’s marketer must focus on clarity: “How do we make it clear to potential customers that we’re in business to help them (as opposed to hunting them)? How can we get a clearer view and understanding of our potential customers, so that we can design a business/a product/a service that best meets their needs? How can we provide them with a clear view and understanding of the value of our product? How can we make it clear to our company employees that their activities define our brand?”
Clarity should be the guiding principle behind every marketing effort. Clearness of thought. Clearness of appearance. Clearness of message. Clarity should inform every campaign, drive every question, and rationalize every dollar spent and every piece of data captured and analyzed.
Whether you’re launching a large scale branding or marketing effort, producing an event, or simply crafting an email message, here are two steps to marketing clarity that should always be followed:
1) Discover. Ask yourself; are we truly clear about how to create superior value so that customers are continuously attracted to us? Is our product or service highly desirable to our customers? Do we show performance value? Financial value? Time value? Entertainment value? Identity value? Or some combination of all of these values?
2) Execute. Once you create clarity then superior value, you must clearly and precisely align all spending and all company and marketing activities to both communicate and deliver that value.
That’s it.
Until marketers understand and embrace the concept of clarity, they’ll continue to waste millions of dollars on new logos, inconsequential ads, viral campaigns, reality TV, blogs, stadium naming, and who knows what else.
Open your eyes! Your marketing plans are an outdated amalgamation of expensive and misguided tactics that collectively fail to add up to a clear and compelling brand. Give customers a reason to choose your product. It’s time to stop and smell the Shalimar!
